New York 2024 Interview: Paul Schrader on Realizing Russell Banks' OH, CANADA

In Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, adapted from Russell Banks’ Foregone, a renowned documentary filmmaker named Leonard Fife subjects himself to a filmed interview while battling the throes of death.

This final interview, to be captured by a former pupil turned documentarian in his own right, is supposed to be a fawning retrospective tribute to a noble life. Instead, Fife takes the confessional aspect of a spotlit interview as an opportunity to alleviate himself of an imposter’s guilt before the watchful eye of the all-seeing lens, and perhaps even more significantly, his wife Emma.

The film is the second collaboration between writer/director Paul Schrader and author Russell Banks, following the acclaimed Affliction in 1997, and it's a project that both writers nursed through sickness and health.

While the book would sadly prove to be Banks’ swan song, for Schrader, as he recently explained to me over coffee, despite the theme of finality permeating his latest offering, his lease on life seems to renew with each upcoming project. I believe he currently has two in the pipeline.

With its focus on a guilt-ridden protagonist who has grown resentful of the public perception of his self-made myth -- one he’s perpetuated in the name of self-aggrandization -- Oh, Canada marks a fascinating entry in this period of Schrader’s career.

To what extent the story holds personal significance is unclear. The myth of Paul Schrader, ‘the lone-wolf auteur’, tells us there is an ancient regret where his long-deceased brother is concerned from when a young up-and-coming Paul was trying to build his own legend. Who knows?

What is crystal clear in this confusing time of cinema’s uncertain future is that films like the continuing works of Paul Schrader are an increasingly dying breed and they must be cherished.

The morning after the film’s premiere, Paul regales me with tales of festival nightlife.

Do you still enjoy attending film festival premieres for your films?

Paul Schrader: Not too much. Occasionally, there are people you want to meet. But mostly the need network is gone.

Tell me about that.

Well, I have a number of people who have helped me make these last two films. I keep my budget down. I keep my subject interesting. I cast interesting people. I can sort of get them made with final cut. I don't need to turn favor with the executive studio class. And they don’t really want to curry favor with me. They want to curry favor with someone who’s going to be around 20 years from now.

So, I mean, I don't need to tell you, but this is obviously a very heavy film that you've just made. I believe you found yourself in pretty dire circumstances when you and Russell both were kind of respectively thinking about this project.

I had long COVID and I was in the hospital three times in a year with bronchial pneumonia. And you know, you have that breathing thing on. I couldn’t help but think “Oh gee… Maybe this is how it happens… You go to the hospital and you don't come out.”

And Russell had taken sick that year. I usually went to see him every summer. But he wrote me that he couldn’t do it that summer because he was having chemo. So I think Sigh ‘That’s probably gonna be it for him…’.

And I think, ‘Hmm, I’ve been thinking about this myself and now I'm thinking about Russell. Russell wrote a book on it. When he was healthy he wrote a book on dying.’ He called it his Ivan Ilyich. Do you know what that is?

Tolstoy.

Right. And I thought, ‘Maybe I could beat that’. He tempted me with it. I’d read it earlier. I had just written something else, but I thought, this was what I should be doing. So I called Russell and got permission, and he was alive during the writing of the script just before I finished, so I had a little input from him.

He ended up dying pretty much with the same maladies and in the same timeframe with the treatments he had researched. But there was one moment prior where he had a respite. And he wrote me, and he said, “I hope to be able to write again, but if I ever do, I guarantee you one thing, I will never write another novel about an artist dying of cancer who seeks redemption.”

In terms of literature, you brought up Tolstoy, but in film, I think about something like Tarkovsky’s THE MIRROR, maybe.

Oh yeah.

Is that something you were thinking about? I guess, what I'm curious to know is, when you were experiencing long COVID and your brain was in this foggy place, did it formally, kind of feel like the Leonard Fife experience in the sense of a sort of sickly remembering?

It wasn’t that. In fact, I have a joke -- probably not a joke exactly -- that every time I think I'm going to die, I get a new idea. You get to thinking, ‘Oh no, maybe this is it.’. Then later it’s, “You know we were talking a while back about maybe dying? Can we put that off for a year or so until I finish this new idea?”

That's funny. Here, filmmaking is keeping you alive. Elsewhere, Tarantino is making headlines because he wants to pack it all in at 60.

I don't understand it. I don't believe in quitting cold turkey that way.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you married pretty early in your career, so you kind of had it all, but he seemed to want to compartmentalize. He had a career, and then he had a family, I don't know.

Anyway, some things that I think you have in common with Leonard Fife are the fact that you both speak very authentically; on Facebook, for example, you're hilariously honest. Leonard Fife is also a very no-bullshit type of person. Was there anything about this character that attracted you to the project?

Not too much. The defining thing about him -- the reason Russell wrote the book, the reason he's giving the interview -- is he’s based his life on a lie, created the myth of the butterfly, the myth of the war resistor, the myth of the political activists. What’s the one thing you want to say before you die? Well, it’s all been a lie. That's not me.

Sure. Nevertheless, do you ever feel a sense of exasperation with the Paul Schrader myth? The fact that your reputation precedes you?

Well, it gets elaborated and I'm partly responsible for that, because there's a time in your career where you're building the whole John Milius kind of thing, you're trying to get your head above the crowd and there are different ways to do it. One way is through intellectual stuff and style. Another way is, you know, bad boy behavior and drugs, but then eventually that catches up with you cause the myth starts feeding on itself.

I was just reading something about myself. Somebody asked me if it was accurate and I said ‘There’s a grain of truth’. It all started with the grain of truth. Something started the story, but now the story has its own life.

You never did an adaptation until the 80s. Am I mistaken about that? I think, more or less.

Well, Last Temptation.

Isn’t that 80s? It seems like you spent the 70s doing original screenplays.

Very few adaptations. Mosquito Coast, I forget when that was.

80s.

Yeah, I guess I did. I started out with Taxi Driver and did a bunch of originals. It wasn't until I actually got the money offers to do adaptations. That was the only reason to do them, which was that it’s guaranteed money. But even then, I was pitching at that time and I remember thinking, ‘Well, if you pitch two, three times a day for a week all the studios, tell your story, lay it all out, see who bites…’

I remember saying to someone, ‘In the time it takes me to organize this pitch, deliver this pitch, and wait for the results of this event, I could have written a script.’ And so, I'm still writing on spec. I've written, let’s see, I’ve written two scripts since Oh, Canada, and the next script is already all outlined in my head. I’ll probably go back to it later tonight.

So are you an outliner?

Yeah. You've seen some of my outlines, right?

No, I haven't. I'm going to Google it as soon as I get home though.

They're doing an exhibit in a New York gallery.

Wow, I didn't realize that was something I was able to look at.

(Showing me a photo on his phone of a loaded notebook page full of crossed-off text ) Here is one of the most meticulous ones.

Oh, wow. Do you cross lines once you've written the scene?

Yeah, and it has a projected page count. Then an actual page count.

How much are you deviating? Are there scenes in between that you've shoved in after the fact?

Well, this is not the first outline. A few things do happen, but not many. I thought it’d be 71 ½ but it came in at 72 ½.

Wow, you must have it down to a science at this point, if you estimate that a scene is going to take a page and a half, it takes a page and a half.

Hopefully, but sometimes you overestimate, sometimes you underestimate,, but there is a way of setting up mileposts just like a long-distance runner. If I get a landmark 15 seconds earlier, does that mean I'm making good time, or that I’m pushing too hard?

Before I let you go on to your next screening, I’d like your take on the future. In these weird modern times, I think a lot of people in my generation are bemoaning the death of film and all that, and the feeling like this thing might be over to some extent. But then I try to remind myself that the medium is only like 100 years old in the first place.

It’s certainly not the end of audio-visual entertainment. Theatrical entertainment is being phased out, but it'll never completely go, like opera never completely went, and theater never completely went. Now they’re niche things. There used to be jazz clubs on every corner, now there are only four or five in town.

Economics is migrating into the home, and it was simply accelerated by COVID. We had spent a year and a half teaching people how not to go out. And then COVID ends and they said, ‘Okay, you can go back now!’ But people said ‘No, we learned how to stay home!’

But I go out probably once a week. I see a movie at least once a day, or a show or something. I like to go to matinees in the morning.

Yeah, I recall you posting about having recently popped into a theater to check out DEADPOOL and then deciding to go on your merry way.

I went and saw this Red Rooms one night and started a conversation cause I just didn’t understand it, but apparently nobody else understood it either. What actually happened in that movie?

Now, I know you're not on TikTok, but it just seems to me -- and maybe you haven't thought that much about it -- but it seems to me that the trend is for videos to get shorter and shorter, like even TV feels like it’s going out the window, right? Are stories at large facing a crisis?

Long Form narratives -- they've been with us for thousands of years. Long Form narrative is really just what an epic is -- Odysseus. And I think there will always be commercially long-form narratives, whether it’s a 2 ½ hour movie or a 10-episode series.

Short films and cat videos just don't satisfy. In terms of pornography, this is why there’s never been an X-rated feature industry. Because they did a study and they found that the part of the brain that is energized by long-form narrative is in opposition with the part of the brain that wants erotic stimuli. And so if you stimulate one area of the brain, you’re pushing back on the other one.

There was a period there in film history where people were saying, ‘This is going to be the first great X-rated movie, but there was never going to be a great X-rated movie.

Interesting. Yeah, it seemed like people were really trying to merge those things in an intellectual way. I guess LAST TANGO didn't do it.

That was never really pornographic. The closest one that came was Caligula and that was kind of an afterthought.

Did you see the new cut where they tried to reinstill the art?

I saw it twice already. After that, I have very little appetite for more.

Isn't that what EYES WIDE SHUT was initially supposed to be? Didn't Kubrick used to speak of wanting to make the ultimate adult film? That's what I had heard anyway, somewhere.

Who knows? You hear these stories. Like I said earlier, these stories take on a certain momentum. I'm reminded of when Peter Biskind did a book and there’s a story in there about Richard Pryor and myself. And I said, ‘The story didn't happen!’. And he says, ‘Well I have a source.’ I said, ‘Well, there were two people in the room. One of them was Richard, and the other was me, so unless Richard is your source, and I don't think he was, how do you know this is true?’ He says, ‘I have a source.’ And I say, ‘Okay! So who’s your source?’ He says, ‘Your brother.’ So I told my brother that and he made it bigger.

And then more broken telephone with Biskind.

Yeah, and that's the way it goes with all these stories.

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Oh, Canada screened at the New York Film Festival.